| Dear Mr. Herrmann, I am not sure it is an everyday occurrence that someone like yourself gets a piece of fan mail, but I could not hold back my thoughts and feelings about your photographs anymore. Currently I have a stack of your books next to my bed and look at them throughout my days and nights. You see, I suffer from chronic pain and spend a lot of my time in bed. I am also a photographer but lately have only been able to use my old Polaroid land camera as a way to make photographs. Although we have never met, I feel that we are connected on a very deep level. There isn’t a day that goes by that I haven’t looked at one of your photographs and felt that we were together in that time and space, perhaps listening to a favorite Patti Smith song or just laying nude together on a hotel bed, staring into each others eyes, no words spoken, only smiles and laughter. Words are useless in this dimension. This is the magic of a Matthias Herrmann photograph. The images posses their own language: a language of contradiction expressed through color saturations and the dance of play. A chosen space—the Hotel Room—which you have deemed a holy land for all that is private and forbidden. CLICK The room clean, lines straight and crisp. The light focused and bright and warm. The only distortion to the immediate landscape of my den, my refuge, and my temporary pedestal are the subtle arcs of my physique and the curves of lines in and around my lips, eyes, and neck. Inside, it’s warm, strange, yet familiar, and well worn. The thought of others before me, using this space for love, for fucking, for things private, and exchanges that are deeply intense is amplified by the rush of blood flow, the hectic cadence of my heart, and the shallow breaths I take as I stumble to throw open the blinds of my private space. I intend to not keep it as private as it has been used in the past and the world before me draped in familiarity is a beckon and a pulse to match the one now, beating out a rhythm beneath my clothes. I was reading some of your journal entries in Hotel Diary the other day. You mentioned that Mapplethorpe’s photo shots were social as opposed to yours being alone. I wonder what the word “alone” means to you. I look at your photos and never think of loneliness. I see only celebration of space and honor given to the exploration of retreat. To me, this is one of the fascinations of the Hotel Room; it is always filled with the energy of past occupants. I often sit in Hotel Rooms and wonder who had stayed here before. Perhaps it was a lonely businessman who dressed up in women’s clothes and photographed himself for an internet personals site. Maybe the room was used by a meth addict who spent their life savings on drug binges and casual sex partners. Maybe it was used as a family gathering for a wedding. And certainly at one time a couple was here on their first vacation together. And to many others, the Hotel Room is a home away from home. I can’t think of anything more social than a hotel room (except maybe a public restroom). It is the one space where all that is not socially accepted can be played out and given new life. It’s a playroom where there is no one to judge us or make us feel sad. CLICK I find myself slowly removing everything I came in with covering my now damp, trembling self. I needed all this yesterday and no amount of hustle can make it all become now. I gaze upon the people outside, passing unaware of the creature and sex, now, exposed in front of them. I am naked in all the meanings of the word. I am revealed. I feel the nearby light bulb's heat touching my skin, the forced air, caressing the moist places and the light of the outside world a cleansing force. I too am a nomad in the Land of the Hotel Room. I have connected with their spaces since I was a child. Later in my teens, I took a job especially so I could travel and stay in hotel rooms throughout the United States. I knew I was safe when I shut my door. I was home. I was free. Most of all, I was anything and anyone that I wanted to be. One particular winter in 1984 I lived in an old rundown hotel in downtown Omaha, Nebraska. I was a painter then. My subjects ranged from nude interpretations of airport screeners to pointilistic renditions of airline disaster preparedness pamphlets. I would take taxis to the closest art store in Council Bluff, Iowa to get my supplies. When night fall came, I would go sit in the hotel bar and drink bloody marys and smoke Camel unfiltered cigarettes. The bartender found out I was a painter from the nosey housekeepers. He begged me every night to come view my works. I gave him every excuse I could as to why he could not see them. The truth is, I knew if he came into my sacred hotel space, all would be ruined. It was a space for my creative energy only and would be shared by no one. Besides, I think he only wanted to get in my pants. CLICK I come to this room, quickly searching for a place to retreat, yet feel no shame in placing myself in the entrance of this cave. I stand before its glass entrance, facing the world and its passers-by in the event eyes meet this person and form, and strangers entangle. I stumble to force the typical hotel room fixtures into working with me; my lighting, the furniture, pushing away ordinary objects to highlight this time for adoration. When I was a young boy I used to dream of someday growing up to have the perfect physique so people would lust over me and dream of being with me. But somehow nature was not listening to me. I ended up going through puberty at the age of 12 .What I soon found out was I was going to be a good-looking skinny kid with an abundance of dark body hair and hazel-blue eyes. Going through puberty at such a young age blasted me into a creative tornado. In those days it was a beat up Rollie that helped me understand and express what I was going through. I used to hike into the woods of Maryland and take self-portraits of myself lying in a carpet of pine needles masturbating or doing my best masculine pose with a bandanna around my head while I puffed on a Marlboro. As my fantasies got more intense, I would ask my friends to pose for me. At the age of 14, I shot my first themed photo project. It was called Psycho Lou Clown. Luckily I had a friend who was a clown and she agreed to be my model—shots of an overdosed clown hanging out of a car with pills littered on the street, clown stabbing a torso—you get the idea. They might have been contrived and overdone, but what I remember most is the feeling I got when I pushed my finger down on the shutter release. It was no different than the feeling I got when I masturbated in the pine forests. It’s the feeling you get right when the first load of cum begins to spurt out of your cock. I get the same physical rush when I take a photograph. I often wonder if you ever feel the same or had the same experience. CLICK I am proud of my life's work and of the vessel in which I go forth in this world. I unabashedly admit I enjoy the feel of my skin, the soft places, the warm under-reaches, and the perfect coexistence my fingers and face make with the other places on my body. There is a shot of you in your 8x10” book that is one of my all time favorite photographs of yours. You are standing in a room with cardboard boxes, wearing only a pair of underwear with the slight outline of your cock and balls exposed. Both eyes are closed while your tongue starts to gently lick your upper lip and your right foot presses down on the shutter release cable. The index card leaning against one of the boxes reads, “I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me”. I look at that photograph when I am having a day filled with unspeakable pain. When the pain has become so unbearable that I can no longer continue to remain on my feet, I look at that image and shut my eyes. I think of you in front of me. Nude. Erect. If I look closer, I notice there is another pair of underwear hanging on the box next to you. The exact same pair; the twin. It is the one image of yours that invites me to participate/to play. I accept and place the other pair of underwear over my erect cock. I turn to look at you as you gently push the shutter cable under my foot. I hear the shutter click, open my eyes and smile. Erotic bliss and the holding of your hand have alleviated my pain for a brief moment in time. I am forever grateful to you. I am never alone when I am with you. CLICK Soon a trickle of sweat dislodges itself from my forehead. I am aware of its languid, curving trip down my face, to my neck and shoulders. I shudder and inhale. Soon, as the trickle of sweat reaches my chest, careening all of a sudden below my pectoral, I follow its serpentine path with my left index finger...down, around, to my torso, past my abdomen and into the upper left corner of my pelvis, where it finally dives, suddenly to my place where my cock and nuts nestle between my thighs. I stare ahead and finally bring my sweaty finger tip to rest inside my crotch, hiding the one tell-tale thing that could show anyone this all made an affect. Down, below, in my hot, warm thrushy underside, I place my finger and begin pressure. My cock, erect and beating with every pulse of blood from my heart, I look down to see a glistening drop of pre-cum form in a kind of tear right at the head of my cock. It shines and glistens like an unworldly heat. I am a figure at the entrance to my own altar, and the droplet of pre-cum, catching the light, is a dancing beacon inviting anyone to watch. Be well, my new friend Matthias. I might not be the fan you thought you would have one day, but I am yours now, always, and forever in time. Watching you always, LOVE Robert (Alex Ulrich) Byler Published in Hotel V, 2007 |